This article is printed in The Queens Village Eagle monthly Republican newsletter Jan 2005:, The Queens Chronicle and this weeks The Wave Jan.7 ^th

Subject of Article: Deals with the causes of current weakness in the NY GOP, based on the experiences of two New Yorkers trying to develop a political alternative in their politically monochromatic "blue state" community.

Leadership Blues

by Tom Lynch and Stuart W. Mirsky

In this last election cycle many in New York City who believed President Bush deserved to be re-elected found themselves out in the cold. Not only were many reluctant to voice their views in public, for fear of a blue state backlash from neighbors and friends, many couldn't even find an outlet through which to offer the embattled president their support. Seeing the lopsided anti-Bush sentiment in our part of the country, as tracked by the never-ending flow of opinion polls, the national Republican Party and the President's own re-election campaign organization chose to put their resources to work elsewhere. The New York State GOP presumably did the same since we saw neither hide nor hair of them throughout much of the recent campaign. Still, some of us were determined to make our voices heard.

Last December we joined a few of our neighbors in one friend's garage to smoke a few cigars in the evening and bemoan the dearth of Republican activity in our part of the city. In fact, as far as we could tell, there wasn't much going on along these lines anywhere else in the city either. Out of that small moment of commiseration, an idea took root. Just because no one seemed to be out there vocally supporting the President didn't mean no one should be. By March of '04 we had ourselves a small Republican club.

We held our first meeting one icy evening late that March, as bitter winds swept in from across Jamaica Bay, pelting us with stinging sleet and hail. Some twenty-five people showed up on that inclement night, all champing at the bit to revive Republican fortunes and support the President in the run-up to the election. We were as surprised by the turnout as anyone, given the weather. And we were surprised again in April, May and June when our membership continued to turn out and to grow.

By mid-July we were hosting 140 people in support of the President, a feat we matched again during the Republican national convention in early September. In the interim, our group sailed a boat for Bush (with a Bush-Cheney campaign banner waving dramatically in the wind) up and down the Hudson River during the convention, garnering many surreptitious "thumbs up" signals from sympathetic Coast Guardsmen and harbor police. As many in this city were gearing up to protest the Republican convention and the President, we were finding a surprising level of goodwill and unspoken support for Bush among New York's working people.

But the one thing that continued to stymie us was the Republican leadership in this town itself. As the election drew near, we desperately contacted our county leadership (and higher) with lists of volunteers we'd gathered to man local get-out-the-vote phone banks, a common practice in election campaigns during crunch time. No dice. No one got back to us. There seemed to be zero interest in the idea. In fact, this wasn't the first time we had encountered such apparent disinterest in our efforts. A year before, as we were just gearing up, we had reached out to nearly everyone we could think of in the Republican hierarchy to offer our services in the presidential campaign and request support in our efforts to re-start a Republican club in our largely one-party community. The only answer we got at that time was a deafening silence as our phone calls went unreturned. But once we had begun holding our meetings, and had actually cornered one unsuspecting Republican leader at a Conservative Party function (there weren't any Republican functions we could find him at!), we finally began to make some headway.

Eventually we got a meeting with some of the leaders at which we offered them our support and asked for nothing more than their recognition in exchange. They told us this would be contingent on our good behavior. We were dumbfounded since we had never given anyone reason to question our behavior in the first place. All we had been trying to do was develop another local organization they could add to what we assumed was their portfolio of local groups and clubs. But it turned out they didn't have a great many of these and that our desire to create a new one, and become part of the Republican Party in New York State, only raised red flags in their minds. In mid-August of this year our membership voted to formally request a Republican Party charter from our county organization for our newly formed club and we dutifully sent off a letter to the leadership to this effect two days later. We never heard back.

Despite the President's clear victory in November and significant Republican gains across the nation, here in New York the outcome couldn't have been more different. In New York State, Republicans lost ground across the board as the Republican majority in the State Senate narrowed considerably, while the Democratic majority increased in the Assembly. In our own community in south Queens, our incumbent Assemblywoman, a Democrat, again ran unopposed as the Queens Republican party once more failed to run a candidate against her, further contributing to the growing statewide Democratic advantage in the Albany legislature. Other local elections in this state went much the same way.

Statewide, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate went down to ignominious defeat after a lackluster and under-funded campaign, handing the Democratic incumbent, Chuck Schumer, an historic win. This despite the fact that another Republican candidate for U.S. Senate had been unceremoniously elbowed aside earlier in the primary season so that Albany's handpicked candidate could get the nod. But Albany's candidate left no footprints, testimony to a disgruntled Republican rank-and-file, denied the chance to select their own candidate, and to a party leadership no longer prepared to mount and sustain a viable challenge to a sometimes controversial incumbent.

So where does all this leave us? After an energetic year of building grassroots support for President Bush, despite disinterest that sometimes bordered on overt hostility from what passes for Republican leadership in our town, we are reluctant to just close our doors and go back to sitting and grousing about things in our neighbor's garage. Even though we no longer expect to see an official Republican charter for our club in our lifetimes (they must be worth their weight in gold, the way the leadership seems to begrudge granting them!) we have decided to keep our organization alive anyway. Our group, the Rockaway Republicans, recently invited downstate Republican leaders, activists and those with an interest in reviving Republican fortunes to join us for a grassroots Republican summit after the New Year. So far we have been surprised (and gratified) by the level of response.

But perhaps we shouldn't have been. Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum and so, we suspect, does democracy. If Republicans in New York State care about finding their voice again and if New York is to see the return of genuine competition in the voting booth, we can no longer afford to sit back and wait for our "leaders" to lead us. If we don't build on the recent presidential momentum now, then we deserve to be blue.